


Harvest at the Festival

by Brumeier



Series: After the Eclipse [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Community: ushobwri, Dysfunctional Family, Fae & Fairies, Fat Shaming, Gen, Small Towns, Supernatural Elements, Transformation, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 21:26:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16205981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brumeier/pseuds/Brumeier
Summary: Harvest was happy when she started losing weight, but things took a strange and unexpected turn.





	Harvest at the Festival

**Author's Note:**

> Written for story_works Harvest Festival Flash Challenge and Monster Fest: Folklore

“How you gonna ever find a man when you’re that big, Harvey?” Mama asked, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She was fixing to lock up the food again, as if her daughter didn’t have a stash of it hidden in her room and her own money to buy more if she wanted. She only wished she had enough money for her own place.

Harvest Balcom had been named by her mother under the fanciful notion that the name would attract abundance and celebration. And abundance had come, but not in the way she’d hoped. 

“I don’t need a man, Mama,” Harvest replied. 

She was an outspoken feminist, but that was mostly out of necessity. She didn’t need a man, but she _wanted_ one. Desperately. Unfortunately, God had seen fit to burden her with excessive amounts of fat, adult acne exacerbated by overly oily skin, and a flat chest that only served to make her big belly look even bigger.

“Every woman needs a man, if only to answer nature’s needs.” Mama would know. She’d answered nature’s needs with a whole parade of men despite the fact she looked twice her age and her teeth were yellowed from nicotine. “You don’t take better care of yourself, you’ll die a virgin.”

Like that should be the ultimate goal of Harvest’s existence.

It wasn’t like she didn’t try to lose the weight. She walked everywhere she needed to go and tried to eat a lot of salads and fresh vegetables. But Doc Scoggins said sometimes these things were genetic and there was no fighting genetics. Maybe Harvest’s daddy, whoever he was, was a big man. Maybe in his family she’d have fit in.

Harvest walked to her job at Mabel’s Kitchen, where she did all the accounts and the ordering, and she walked to the Quik Stop, and she walked to the library, and she walked home. She heard every derogatory thing people said about her behind her back – fat didn’t mean deaf – and wished God had seen fit to give her at least one attractive feature to build her self-esteem around.

The change, when it came, was subtle. Harvest noticed it after the solar eclipse and that strange episode with the dumpster. (She’d never gotten the chance to find something for herself inside it, not before Sally Everly sent it away.) The elastics on her pants were a little less tight, she was a little less out of breath after her walks, and she felt smug because surely it was from all the hard work she was doing.

But the weight kept coming off, like in that story where the guy was cursed by a gypsy.

“You smokin’ meth?” Mama asked.

“Where would I even get that?” Harvest asked in return. The hardest drug she knew about in town was pot and she’d always been too afraid to try it.

“There’s always someone,” Mama replied vaguely.

Every day when she got up, Harvest weighed herself on the bathroom scale. And every day the numbers were significantly lower. It was scary, so she went to see Doc Scoggins. He ran every test he knew how and sent Harvest up to the city to the big hospital to get the ones he didn’t. None of the doctors could find a single thing wrong with her. Even her diabetes went away.

Mama, who’d always complained about Harvest being so big, complained just as loudly about her daughter wearing ill-fitting clothes because she couldn’t keep up with all the weight loss.

“You look like a rag bag.”

Harvest tried hiding the weight loss behind her baggy clothes, but she couldn’t hide the fact that her double chin was disappearing and her acne was clearing up. She heard plenty of speculation as she walked to and from the diner every day – drugs, cancer, diet pills, anorexia, bulimia, delayed puberty – and she wanted to shout at everyone and tell them no, something unnatural was happening to her, something she didn’t ask for.

She thought she might just keep on losing weight until she disappeared entirely, but things finally evened out when she reached a willowy size six. Harvest looked at herself critically in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. She didn’t look sickly, and her bones weren’t sticking out. She looked healthy. There was a nice curve to her hips, and her boobs had come in too; she’d gone from an A cup to a C cup. Her skin was unblemished, her cheekbones delineated without the use of makeup, and even her hair was more lustrous and thicker than it had been.

Harvest didn’t recognize her own reflection. It was like she was a different person. A beautiful, sexy person.

Men started noticing her, too, which was unsettling and flattering all at the same time. Sally Everly had taken notice as well, and that was the kind of attention Harvest didn’t want. Miz Everly knew all about weird things and how to get rid of them. Like that giant octopus in the lake. Harvest didn’t want to be vanished, so she avoided Miz Everly like the plague.

“You make a pact with the devil, Harvey?” Mama asked. “That’s the only thing what explains all this.”

“It must be God’s own miracle,” said Ida Westcott, the waitress at Mabel’s.

“You rob a bank to pay for all that plastic surgery?” Miz Byers asked, looking down her nose at Harvest.

“That just ain’t right,” Old Man Erickson said when Harvest ran into him at the post office.

“You tryin’ out for Apple Princess this year?” Doc Scoggins asked. “You got a real shot.”

Harvest hadn’t even thought about entering the contest. Everyone knew it was a beauty pageant, even though the winner was supposed to know all about apples. The idea of entering would have been laughable any other year, but things had changed. She was turning heads for all the right reasons. Why not Apple Princess?

She studied, and she splurged on some pretty fabric to make a dress, and she practiced a regal walk and better posture.

“Ain’t no-one gonna vote for you, foolish girl,” Mama said. “Everyone knows you been touched by an evil hand.”

“Everyone does _not_ know that, Mama. A lot of people like the way I look now.”

“They’re scared of you, Harvey. That’s different.”

Harvest didn’t care if that was true or not. She liked being treated different, treated better. She’d always known beautiful people lived happier lives, and now she had the experience to prove it.

On the day of the Apple Festival, Harvest went to the salon nice and early to get her hair done up all fancy with ringlets. Miz Stables did her make-up so she looked like one of those models on the magazine covers. And she put on her new dress, the color of a Granny Smith apple, which made her look like the princess she knew she could be.

The Village Green was covered with stands selling crafts and food and all things apple-related. There was a dunking booth, where a whole line of people paid good money for the chance to dunk annoying little Tommy Bunch, and a place to get face painting. Diggly Creek Orchards set up an apple press to show how they made cider. There was a baking contest by the gazebo, which Miz Vesper would probably win like always. And under the main tent was the dance floor for the Happy Feet Cloggers and the stage for the Apple Princess competition. 

Harvest answered every question with confidence. She’d always been a good student and she had excellent retention. The other girls shot her hateful looks, and she didn’t know if it was because she was smart or because she was pretty, and that was a strange feeling.

“We’re down to the final question,” Mayor Haddad said into the microphone. She was wearing a golden apple pin on her blouse. “Harvest Balcom, what would you do during your reign as Apple Princess if you won?”

“I would make it my goal to educate and…and to spread…uh…” Harvest lost her train of thought. Her whole body flashed hot, like she’d had scalding water thrown over her, and a strong back spasm had her gripping the microphone stand with both hands just to stay on her feet.

“Ms. Balcom? Are you unwell?”

“Educate,” Harvest repeated through clenched teeth. “And spread the joy of…of…”

She couldn’t help the scream the ripped out of her throat. It felt like her back was being shredded from the inside out. Someone called for Doc Scoggins, but Sally Everly got there first. She ran right up on stage and unzipped the back of Harvest’s dress, pushing the two halves apart. Just in the nick of time, too, because _something_ burst out of Harvest’s back, and some of the people under the tent started screaming themselves. Mayor Haddad fell off the stage.

“I was afraid of that,” Miz Everly muttered.

Harvest, who was feeling miraculously recovered, looked over her shoulder to try and see what had happened.

She’d sprouted a pair of fairy wings. Real ones, green to match her dress and as delicate as a gossamer web. New muscles, too, to make them move. Harvest clutched her dress to her chest to keep it from falling down and looked helplessly at Miz Everly.

“What do I do?”

“You’ll have to come with me, I’m afraid. You better say goodbye to your mother first.”

Harvest shook her head. “I got nothing to say to her.”

“Well, that’s probably for the best then.”

“Are you…are you going to vanish me like that dumpster?” Harvest asked nervously.

Miz Everly smiled, though it seemed sad instead of happy. “No. But I am going to have to send you away for a little while. There’ll be more changes still, and you need proper training.”

“Training?”

Which is how Harvest ended up in a clearing in the woods with Miz Everly, standing next to a circle of mushrooms. They hadn’t walked that far from the Green, but somewhere along the way Harvest had lost her shoes. Her feet were tingling with pins and needles, like they’d fallen asleep, but she could feel a thrum of energy through the soles of her feet. And they’d had to chase off some of the young men who’d tried to follow.

Miz Everly said a few words in a language that sounded like it came from _Lord of the Rings_ , and in a flash there was someone, or some _thing_ , standing inside the circle. 

“Sally,” the creature – for surely nothing that beautiful was human – said. Harvest couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but she was immediately enthralled by the musical sound of their voice and the way their skin seemed to glow and the delicate points at the ends of their ears. “I hadn’t thought we’d have chance to meet again.”

“That makes two of us. I’ve got a situation here I could use your help with.”

Miz Everly nudged Harvest forward, and the ethereal creature cocked its head and looked her over.

“When did this happen?”

“About twenty minutes ago.”

“That’s very unusual.”

“You’re telling me,” Miz Everly said with a snort. “You have no idea what I’ve been dealing with around here lately.”

The creature nodded. “I’ll take her. Are you looking for a permanent arrangement?”

“Temporary, for now. I’ll have to see how things develop.”

“Come, child.” The creature held out its hand to Harvest. “I shall introduce you to others of your kind.”

“There are more like me?” Harvest asked hopefully.

“Many more.”

She took the proffered hand without hesitation and stepped inside the mushroom circle, wings rippling in the light breeze. 

“Don’t forget who you are, Harvest Balcom,” Miz Everly said, but Harvest didn’t give her another thought.

In a flash, she was gone.

**Author's Note:**

>  **AN:** Initially I wasn’t going to participate in the Harvest Fest challenge. I didn’t have anything new to say on the subject. But then I got thinking. What if it was someone _named_ Harvest? Which immediately led to my Eclipse ‘verse. So this happened.
> 
> The story Harvest is referring to, about the man cursed by gypsies, is _Thinner_ by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman).


End file.
